PARIS (Reuters) – France and Britain are proposing a partial one-month truce between Russia and Ukraine that would not cover ground fighting, French President Emmanuel Macron told the daily newspaper Le Figaro on Sunday.
However, Macron said the truce would cover air, sea and energy infrastructure attacks.
“In the event of a ceasefire, it would be very difficult to verify (fighting) along the front was being respected,” Macron told Le Figaro, adding that the front line was equivalent to the distance between Paris and Budapest.
Macron spoke to Le Figaro as he flew to London for a meeting with European leaders, convened by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to advance efforts at drawing up a Ukraine peace plan.
The summit in London came two days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s White House meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump ended in acrimony. World leaders have offered a strong show of support to the Ukrainian leader and promised to do more to help his nation.
Under the Franco-British proposal, European ground troops would only be deployed to Ukraine in a second phase, Macron said.
“There will be no European troops on Ukrainian soil in the coming weeks,” Le Figaro quoted Macron as saying.
“The question is how we use this time to try to obtain a truce, with negotiations that will take several weeks and then, once peace is signed, a (troop) deployment.”
Zelenskiy, asked if he was aware of the plan, told reporters in London: “I’m aware of everything.”
Macron has said his country and other European nations must spend more on defense. He told Le Figaro that this might mean in the region of 3% to 3.5% of gross domestic product. The European Commission also needed to be more innovative in financing defense spending, he said.
(Reporting by Richard Lough; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Comments